Ductless Mini-Split Installation in Kirkland, WA

How many heads your house actually needs

This is the question that decides the price, and it is the one nobody can answer from a phone call.

A head is not a room. A head serves a volume of air that can circulate. An open-plan downstairs with a stair opening is often one head. Three bedrooms down a hallway with the doors shut at night is three, because a head in the hallway heats the hallway. A bonus room over a garage — the classic Kirkland retrofit — is one head on its own, and it is frequently the only room in the house that has ever needed solving.

So the range is genuinely wide. One head for the room that has never been the right temperature. Four or five on a single outdoor unit for a house that has never had central anything. Those are not the same job and they are thousands of dollars apart, which is why there is no headline ductless price on my list and why anyone quoting you one over the phone has not asked enough questions yet.

The thing to ask before you buy, not after: is the outdoor unit sized with room to add a head later? Staging a job is completely reasonable — do the two rooms that are actually a problem now, add the third next year — but only if the outdoor unit was chosen for it on day one. If it was not, adding later means buying the outdoor unit twice.

What it costs, and where I stop guessing

My prices are published on my Google Business Profile where anyone can read them without talking to me first. These are the real figures, and every one of them is a “from” price:

Multi-zone ductless

priced at the site visit — head count decides it

American Standard 2-ton heat pump, side discharge, multi-stage

from $11,264

Honeywell S1200 smart thermostat

from $460

Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium

from $259

Air Scrubber UV whole-home purification

from $1,040

Mechanical permit

set by the City of Kirkland — the actual figure goes on your quote after the site visit

You will notice there is no multi-zone ductless number on that list. That is deliberate, for the reason in the section above. What a published price also cannot know is your house: a crawlspace you cannot stand up in, an electrical panel with no space left in it, or a line set that has to run three times its normal length because the only place the outdoor unit can sit is round the far side of the building. Any one of those moves the number, and I would rather tell you at your kitchen table than discover it on day two.

There is a 5% discount for active military, veterans and first responders, and financing is available.

Why retrofitting ducts costs more than the equipment

Adding ductwork to a finished house is not really an HVAC job. It is a carpentry job with an HVAC job at the end of it — dropped ceilings, lost closet depth, patched and repainted drywall — and you pay for all of that before you have paid for a single BTU of heat. In a house with plaster walls and no attic to work in, that carpentry can cost more than the mechanical equipment it exists to serve.

Ductless skips the problem rather than solving it. One outdoor unit, a three-inch penetration through the wall, and heads only in the rooms that need them.

The honest counterweight, because it matters more than the sales pitch: if your house already has sound ducts, ducted is normally the better system. It is out of sight, everything filters through one filter, and it costs less per square foot of house. If someone recommends ductless without looking in your crawlspace first, they have not answered the question — they have quoted the thing they had in the van.

Ducted heat pump installation in Kirkland

Will a mini-split keep the house warm in winter?

Yes. The equipment I install is cold-climate inverter equipment, rated to keep producing heat into negative temperatures. Kirkland does not get there.

The doubt is fair, because it used to be true. Heat pumps from twenty years ago shed most of their output as the outdoor temperature dropped, which is why so many Puget Sound houses ended up with electric strip heat bolted on behind them.

Inverter equipment changed that. The compressor varies its speed instead of banging on and off, so it holds capacity much further down the temperature range and spends most of its life running slowly. Running slowly is also what makes it quiet — which matters more in a mini-split than in a ducted system, because the indoor head is in the room with you rather than down in a crawlspace.

One thing worth asking when you are comparing ductless quotes: get the rated heating capacity at 17°F and at 5°F for the specific outdoor unit being proposed. It is printed on the manufacturer's data sheet. A contractor who will not show it to you has told you something useful.

Where the heads go is a twenty-year decision

Head placement gets settled on install day on a lot of jobs, and that is too late for it to be a considered decision. A head in the wrong wall is something you look at every day for twenty years.

What decides it: where the line set can reach without running across the front of the house, where the condensate can fall to somewhere sensible, how the air throws across the room, and whether there is a wall the furniture is not already against. Head height on an outside wall above a window is common because it throws air the length of the room. Directly above where you sit is a mistake people make once.

The exterior matters as much as the interior. Line-hide should run straight and tight to the building, not loop across the siding, and penetrations get sealed properly rather than foamed and forgotten. On a multi-zone job the branch box should be somewhere reachable and the ports labelled, because at some point someone who is not me will open that wall.

What the install involves

Most ductless jobs run two to four days. Head count and how the building is put together decide it, not the size of the equipment.

Before anything — the site visit

I measure the house and run a load calculation, not square footage off the listing. I look at the panel, the crawlspace, where the outdoor unit can physically go, and how the line set gets there without running across the front of your house.

Day one — heads and line sets

Where each head goes is settled on the wall before anything is cut. Line sets run, penetrations sealed, exterior line-hide kept straight and tight to the building.

Day one to two — the outdoor unit

Set on a level pad with proper clearances and vibration isolation, condensate routed somewhere that will still make sense in ten years, and a weatherproof disconnect within sight of the unit, sized and grounded to code.

Day two to three — vacuum and charge

The refrigerant circuit is pulled down to a deep vacuum and charged to specification. This is the step that decides whether the system runs for twenty years or fails in its third summer.

Last — commissioning and the walk-through

System run, airflow and charge verified, controls configured for your specific equipment, and then I show you how to actually use it. Most people never touch half of what they paid for because nobody sat down and explained it.

The step that decides whether the system lasts is the vacuum and the charge, and it is the one nobody watching from the kitchen can evaluate. That is where a refrigeration journeyman's licence stops being a line on a website.

Permits in Kirkland

I hold a general contractor's licence as well as a refrigeration journeyman's licence, which means I pull the permit myself instead of subbing it out or quietly leaving it off the quote.

Kirkland is King County, and the mechanical permit goes through the City of Kirkland rather than through Snohomish County the way most of my work does. The fee is set by the city, so it is a real line on your quote and I will have the actual figure for you at the site visit — not a number I guessed on a webpage.

Why it matters more than it sounds: an unpermitted install is the thing that surfaces when you sell the house, and unpermitted electrical work is the thing your insurer asks about after a fire. It also means somebody other than me looks at what I did, which is the point.

A multi-zone job, in the customer's words

This is a Google review, quoted exactly as it was written:

“I am extremely satisfied with ExactAir. Most other companies have expensive quotes and used high pressure sales tactics. Rylan was able to immediately set himself apart with genuine conversation and upfront expectations and pricing.”

“Rylan installed a 5-zone minisplit in our 1930s home. He is the real deal; extremely passionate, knowledgeable, and most importantly, he cares. The system is sized appropriately for our home, and the installation work looks fantastic! I cannot recommend him enough. You will not be disappointed.”

— Alex Gebhart, 4 July 2026

Read the rest on Google

Rebates — what I'll tell you, and what I won't

I am not putting a rebate figure on this page.

Utility programmes and tax credits change, they have eligibility rules that turn on your exact address and on how your house is heated today, and a number I type this month is worth nothing to you in February. Kirkland makes that worse rather than better: it is a different county and a different utility from most of the area I work in, so a programme that applied to a house I worked on last month may have nothing to do with yours.

What I will do instead is tell you at the site visit what actually applies to your address and what it is worth — including when the answer is nothing — and then you should verify it yourself before you plan around it. That is a better use of your money than trusting a webpage, mine included.

Who is actually turning up

ExactAir Home Comfort is one person: me, Rylan Utter. I am based in Everett, not in Kirkland, and I would rather say that plainly than dress it up. Kirkland is inside the area I serve and I take work there, but I am not round the corner and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What you get instead is that the person who quotes your job is the person who installs it, and there is no commissioned salesman in between. I am reachable 7am to 8pm, seven days a week.

Ductless heat pumps in Kirkland